On Hogmanay, wur band releases its second ep of the year and its third in a little over 15 months. As has become my tradition, I’ll blog about the songs on Crackle on release day, but what’s interesting (to me at least) is that this leaves us with only four songs left from the original alblum recordings. They’ll be released sometime in 2013, but what it really means is that we need to think about writing new ones now.
This has been the plan all along. The last year or so have been about concentrating on finishing and releasing our old material, on learning about the recording tools we have at our disposal, on experimenting with sounds and techniques. If you listen to our releases, from Written On The Kitten through Glitterflies and Sundaymouth, you’ll see a development, and hopefully in Crackle you’ll hear another step forward.
But, yes, new songs. See we have this thing called the Murnie Songbook. It’s where we store all our lyrics, and I was startled to realise that it now contains 90 songs. Only a third or so of those have so far been worked into full songs by the band. A few of them have been retired as too silly even for us, a few more because they were frankly pants. A handful have been worked on at some point or other but haven’t been given the official stamp of completion. Which leaves a whole bunch ready for action. And I add more as and when they slop out of my head.
What can Murnie fans expect? Well, more often these days they tend to be of the Stype-school of obscure (even to oneself) stream-of-consciousness rather than character and story based. The general tone is darker, perhaps more serious, definitely more cynical, than our early material, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The latest song I added to the book is called “The Stains”, the next is likely to be something called “Monoxide Blonde”.
I’m going to post my annual creative challenge come the new year, but part of it will include the challenge to get some of those lyrics out of the book and into music. And perhaps, at the same time, write a few more. Ten feels like a nice round number. It’d bring the contents of the Songbook up to a nice round 100.
Wow!
ayeahmur 